It is hard to discern exactly what kinds of false positives H thinks most often show up in all these gun use surveys. He waffles on the issue of whether people are: (1) consciously inventing nonexistent events; (2) consciously but honestly misrepresenting accounts of real events that did not really involve DGU (e.g., they involved aggressive use of a gun); or (3) unconsciously distorting real events. He seems to have doubts himself about possibility (1) occurring very often, hastening to assure readers that false responders do not necessarily have to lie, but is otherwise unwilling to commit himself to the relative frequency of these types of misreports.

It is worth emphasizing how difficult it was for our RS to falsely report a completely nonexistent event as a DGU. Unlike the UFO example that H insists is somehow parallel to reports of DGUs, a respondent who wanted to falsely report a nonexistent DGU could not qualify as having had such an experience merely by saying "Yes." Rather, respondents had to provide as many as nineteen internally consistent responses covering the details of the alleged incident. In short, to sustain a false DGU claim, RS had to do a good deal of agile mental work, and stay on the phone even longer. On the other hand, all it took to yield a false negative was for a DGU-involved R to speak a single inaccurate syllable: "No." The point is not that false positives were impossible, but rather that it was far harder to provide a false positive than a false negative.

Consider also the context in which H imagines all these false reports to have occurred. Randomly selected people were called unexpectedly, and questioned rapidly by total strangers, for no more than fifteen minutes, with one question immediately following another. There was no prolonged opportunity to invent a nonexistent event, rehearse inaccurate details, or to otherwise get an false story straight. RS providing a false positive had to be not only dishonest but very quick-witted as well.

Regarding possibility (2), we noted that most of the DGUs were linked with the types of crimes¾burglaries, robberies, and sexual assaults¾where there is little opportunity for participants to be honestly confused about who was the victim and who was the offender. While a few RS may well have consciously misrepresented aggressive actions as defensive, and a very few might have consciously invented entirely fictitious events, it is hard to see how RS could report an account of a real burglary, robbery, or sexual assault in which they were aggressors and somehow honestly distort it into a DGU incident.

This kind of misunderstanding of real events in a way that falsely qualifies them as DGUs is more plausible in connection with male-against-male assault incidents, such as when people prefer to characterize their partly aggressive, partly defensive behavior in "mutual combat" incidents as purely defensive in character. We addressed this latter possibility in our article and showed that it could not account for more than a small fraction (probably less than a tenth) of the incidents we counted as DGUs. H does not rebut that evidence.